A cross-cultural study of the relationship between organizational justice and organizational commitment: China, South Korea, and Australia

Organizational justice is a major concern of employees. It has been suggested that it is related to organizational commitment, which is one of the most important employee attitudes reflecting the quality of the employee-organization relationship. However, insufficient is known about this relationship and its mechanism in cross-cultural contexts. Additionally, most justice research investigates North America or conducts comparisons between North America and other cultures. To better contribute to this area, this thesis further examines the justice–commitment relationship focusing on China, South Korea, and Australia. Data were collected from university employees of the three countries/cultures. Analyses were based on three models, and examined effects across the three countries/cultures. The first model compared organizational commitment’s relationships with distributive and procedural justice, and the mediating effect of trust in the organization in these relationships. The second model simultaneously examined the moderating roles of two cultural values (individualism and power distance), and the mediating role of trust in organizational commitment’s relationships with distributive justice and procedural justice. Using a similar approach, the third model employed two cultural orientations (Doing and Mastery cultural orientations), which have not previously been examined in this context, as moderators to test the unmediated and trust-mediated justice–commitment relationships. Results revealed a number of significant cross-cultural differences in the relationship between justice and commitment and the trust-mediated mechanism. All four cultural values/orientations at least partially moderated the first stage of the justice–trust–commitment relationship. Although strong evidence for cross-cultural differences in the moderating effects of cultural values/orientations was not obtained, the small proportion of significant moderating effects also provide some interesting findings. This thesis extends our knowledge of the justice–commitment relationship through the use of more refined approaches, the investigation of the Asia-Pacific region, and the simultaneous study of China, South Korea, and Australia. It largely confirms previous cross-cultural justice literature, informing the generalizability of justice research to this relatively new context. More importantly, it initiates a new perspective in the area of justice by integrating culture and justice using a mediation-moderation combination. Further, consideration of cultural aspects as attributes of the individual as well as the society, through individual-level and societal-level comparisons of the justice–commitment relationship and its mechanism, have added new knowledge (e.g., the roles of Doing and Mastery cultural orientations) that is useful for further development of theories linking culture and fairness issues.